What is the author's style in Small Gods: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett?

Small Gods is written from a third-person and omniscient perspective. While most of the action follows the protagonist, Brutha, there are several scenes in which Brutha does not appear. While the focus is apt to shift between characters, the reader is only privy to one internal world at a time, with the narrative strongly influenced by the personality of the active character. Following Brutha, for example, the world seems idealized and hopeful, whereas when the story follows Om, the perspective is more cynical and jaded.

Small Gods is a highly allegorical work and clearly intended as a vehicle for humanist ideology. The work prizes reason over faith, depicting the gods as fallible, interfering, and disconnected from the cares of human beings. Instead, the narrative places higher priority on matters of day-to-day existence, such as governance, fairness and doing right by one's fellow man. While it wouldn't be precisely accurate to the call the work "secular," the gods are so humanized as to lack divinity. They metaphorically fill the real-world roles of kings, aristocrats or dictators.

Although the author is not himself a character in the story, Pratchett is nevertheless felt as the supreme authority of Discworld. While the characters may be wrong, confused or uncertain, what the author presents as true is undeniably so. The reader, for example, can trust that the world is shaped like a disc, that it rests on the backs of four elephants, and that those elephants in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle. Pratchett himself is the authority that establishes for the reader that the Omnians are wrong in their opinions and views.